Survey Shows Asian Developers Embracing Free Developer Programs

According to a recent survey, Asian developers opted into free developer programs at a rate of over two-and-a-half times that of paid programs over the past year. The survey of over 400 developers in the Asia Pacific region was conducted by Evans Data Corp. in October. Of the developers surveyed, half were in a program, with 28% in a free program, 12% in a paid program, and 11% in both paid and free programs.

Janel Garvin, CEO of Evans Data Corp., observed: "With the resources available today through free and open organizations and even through social networking sites, it [sic] getting to be very difficult to charge for developer program membership. Paid programs need to supply considerably more value through support and resources than they did in the past in order to recruit and retain developers."

Two-thirds of Asia Pacific developers are under the age of 30, making them the youngest of any region.85% work for companies that have geographically distributed teams.The three most used frameworks are Win32, Java Server Faces and Apache Struts.